For many of us, Halloween is a day we get to depart from reality. But for Sandra Belanger, ghosts, the afterlife, and death are part of everyday life. That’s because she’s a “spirit medium.” She explains what that means to KALW’s Priscilla Yuki Wilson.

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SARAH BELANGER: Look at that… I guess they call that a murder of crows. That’s what a group of crows, a large group of crows, is called.

PRISCILLA YUKI WILSON: That’s Sandra Belanger. It’s 11 a.m. and the weather in Oakland is perfect for a stroll. The sunny day almost makes me forget that we’re in the middle of the Mountain View Cemetery.

BELANGER: Clearly, crows also have that thing about death attached to them as well.

Belanger’s dressed in black and her long, shiny, silver hair is swaying from the calm breeze. She hasn’t spent as much time here as she has in the cemeteries she grew up visiting in Massachusetts, but she feels comfortable here nonetheless.

She thought it would be a fitting place to discuss her work as a spirit medium.

BELANGER: That’s the funny thing about cemeteries, is that you can still have relationships with people even after they’re gone from this earth, at some level.

Belanger knows her way around. She points out the grave of Domenico Ghirardelli of Ghirardelli chocolates, and excitedly points out the grave of Elizabeth Short, also known as the Black Dahlia, who was given the nickname after her highly publicized murder in the late ‘40s.

BELANGER: We’re all basically eternal.

For Belanger, Halloween is a time to acknowledge the unknown, the impossible, and even the inconceivable. For her, it’s not as much about zombies and vampires, but more about acknowledging death and the afterlife – two things, she says, many people don’t want to think about.

BELANGER: We do everything we can to keep people from dying, we spend a lot of time and effort on coming up with new technologies to do that but no one ever really thinks about what happens to our consciousnesses after we die. And from a standpoint of physics, energy cannot be destroyed; it can only change form. So, it would stand to reason that with a human being, being powered by electrical energy, that’s not going to just dissipate.

Which means, Belanger believes that after people die, something about them is still out there. And her job is to communicate with them. She says her work is about bridging the gap between the living and the dead.

BELANGER: Most people I think want an afterlife; I think prefer to have an afterlife. I think the concept of winking out like a burnt out light bulb at the end of your life is frightening to a lot of people.

Belanger says she’s always been open to “the other side,” as she calls it, since she was a little girl. But it wasn’t until a near death experience in 1981, that her life really transferred between two worlds.

BELANGER: I had the definite out-of-body experience. The only way that I can describe is like… It would be like if you were a dolphin in the sky, being able to do barrel rolls, and you can move around at the speed of thought. I mean, the incredible freedom of not being in your body, to be completely 100% unencumbered from the standpoint of being a complete consciousness but to have no limitations as far as movement. It was pretty astounding.

Belanger says that she didn’t want to stay in limbo – the term she uses to explain where she was – but spirits there convinced her to come back because she still had unfinished business, what she took to signify that she was meant to come back to become a spirit medium.

So… you might be wondering: How could this story be possible? Is there any way she can prove it?

Belanger says the best form of proof out there is Electronic Voice Phenomena, otherwise known as EVP.

BELANGER: People have been researching EVP since late ‘40s and early ‘50s. Initially people used regular tape recorders and using a new tape, they would go to a sound-proof area and they would record. And things other than what was said in the room would show up on the tape.

Now Belanger says there is computer software that records EVP, and therefore allows you to talk back and forth with the spirit world. She says this has completely transformed how she explains her work to people.

BELANGER: Basically, I’ve been always worried about people thinking I’m crazy because of this and that’s a valid concern. So, I was striving for some way to prove to other people that what I was experiencing wasn’t schizophrenia.

EVP’s sound like one of those voices programmed into our computers. Oftentimes it can have static, and Belanger says only a highly trained ear can pick up information and stretch it out for “normal” folks to also hear. Belanger hears the phrase “death is a gift” in the slowed down version of one EVP.

Belanger says it takes her sometimes a few hours just to go through two minutes of a recording.

BELANGER: The thing about EVP research is that for every question you answer, it uncovers a bottomless pit of more questions so there’s really no end it.

Now, there is no scientific explanation for EVP. But Belanger says these phrases or questions heard are not a coincidence and that this is truly a connection to the spirit world. But she doesn’t think she has to go out and convince people.

BELANGER: I provide them with my data and they have to make their own mind up.

And Belanger’s connection to the spirit world comes especially handy when people are looking for answers that only the spirits would have.

BELANGER: I’ve actually been able to provide some answers for police, for law enforcement, for family members, about what happened to their loved one.

I worked on the Laci Peterson case back in 2003 and my feeling was that it had very much helped her family in dealing with the whole situation.

Even though her work sometimes brings up more questions than answers, Belanger is absolutely confident of at least one thing:

BELANGER: And that is that spirits are real. Beyond that it’s all theory, conjecture and hypothesis.

When it comes to Halloween, Belanger invites people to take it as an opportunity to “memento Mori” or “remember your mortality.” And who knows, maybe our spirits do live forever.

For Crosscurrents, I’m Priscilla Yuki Wilson.

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